Clan Hamilton · 1804
Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr at Weehawken
By the spring of 1804 Aaron Burr, Vice President of the United States, had been politically blocked at every turn by Alexander Hamilton's correspondence and was running for the governorship of New York with no chance of winning. After a public letter quoted Hamilton as having spoken of him with what was glossed as a "more despicable opinion", Burr demanded retraction. Hamilton refused. They met on the duelling-ground at Weehawken on the cliffs above the Hudson on the morning of the eleventh of July 1804. Hamilton, by his published note left with his counsel the night before, had decided to throw away his fire and discharge the pistol harmlessly. Burr, who knew nothing of this, took an aimed shot. The ball entered Hamilton's right side just above the iliac crest, fractured the second lumbar vertebra and lodged in the spine; he died at two o'clock the following afternoon at the home of his friend William Bayard on Greenwich Street, Manhattan. He was forty-seven years old. The duel ended Burr's political career and made Hamilton, in death, the founding figure of the financial system of the United States.
It is twenty past six in the morning of the eleventh of July 1804, on the grass shelf below the cliffs at Weehawken in New Jersey, on the west bank of the Hudson opposite Manhattan, in pale early light with a low mist coming off the river. He is forty-seven years old. He is Major-General Alexander Hamilton, Inspector-General of the United States Army (a peace-time appointment), former Secretary of the Treasury, in a black coat and a soft black hat, with his second Nathaniel Pendleton and his physician David Hosack twenty paces above on the higher ledge.
Aaron Burr is on the same ledge, seven feet two inches by Pendleton's measurement, in a black coat and the duelling pistols of Hamilton's brother-in-law John Church laid on the grass between them. Burr's second is William Van Ness. The pistols have been loaded. The seconds have agreed the rules: ten paces, count of three, fire on the count. Pendleton is in charge of the count.
Hamilton has, at his lawyers' offices on Manhattan the night before, written and signed a paper that he has left in his desk. The paper says, in his own hand, that he intends, by the form of duel as practised in New York, to throw away his fire. He has, by the same paper, given his reasons. He believes the duel is unjust. He believes Christian conscience forbids him to take Burr's life. He has, however, agreed to the duel because his political requires it. He has signed the paper. He has not told Pendleton. He has not told Hosack. He has told nobody except his lawyer.
He thinks: the pistol I have is hair-trigger. The trigger pull is set at half a pound. If my finger contracts the pistol will fire.
He thinks: I can pull the trigger before I have raised the pistol. If I pull the trigger before the count, the ball will go into the ground at my feet. Burr will know what I have done. The seconds will know. New York will know within the week.
He thinks: if I throw away my fire, Burr may fire and not hit me, in which case the affair is over. Burr may fire and hit me, in which case the affair is also over. Either way the duty is met.
He thinks: Eliza is at the country house. The children are at the country house. I made provision last night.
Pendleton calls present. Hamilton raises the pistol. Burr raises his. Pendleton begins the count. One. Two.
On two, by Pendleton's deposition five days later, Hamilton's pistol discharges. The ball goes into the high ground above Burr's head and clips a branch ten feet up the cedar tree to Burr's right. Burr's pistol fires, by Pendleton, on the count of three (by Van Ness, simultaneously with Hamilton's). The ball, fired at seven feet of separation, takes Hamilton in the right side, above the hip, breaks the second lumbar vertebra, and lodges in the spine.
He is taken across the river by boat to William Bayard's house at 80 Jane Street, Greenwich. He knows, by Hosack's testimony, that the wound is mortal. He says, on the boat, this is a mortal wound, doctor. He says it twice. He receives Communion in the morning from Bishop Moore of the Episcopal Church, who has been called to him and has hesitated for an hour because the bishop disapproves of duels. He sees Eliza at the bedside on the afternoon of the eleventh; he tells her remember, my Eliza, you are a Christian. He sees the seven children, one at a time, on the morning of the twelfth. He dies at two in the afternoon of the twelfth.
Burr, by Pendleton's account corroborated by Van Ness, did not approach the body. He left the duelling-ground within ten minutes. He returned to his house in Richmond Hill in lower Manhattan that morning. The Coroner of Bergen County, New Jersey, indicted him for murder a fortnight later; the New York Coroner's jury did the same. He fled to South Carolina, returned to Washington in November 1804, presided as Vice President over the impeachment trial of Justice Samuel Chase in February 1805 (a duty which the Constitution did not allow him to escape and which he discharged with the formal dignity of his office), left Washington at the end of his term in March 1805, and never held public office again. He spent the next thirty-one years bankrupt, in exile in Europe for four of them, on legal projects in upstate New York and the western frontier, and died, mostly forgotten, in 1836. The hair-trigger pistols are in the collection of the J.P. Morgan Library at New York. The Weehawken ground is now the Boulevard East Hamilton Park, with a bronze marker. Hamilton the musical of 2015 sold five and a half million tickets in its first decade and made the affair, two centuries after, one of the few duels of the early republic that any modern citizen of the United States can name.
More stories of Clan Hamilton
- Patrick Hamilton at St AndrewsPatrick Hamilton, son of Sir Patrick Hamilton of Kincavel and Catherine Stewart (granddaughter of James II), was twenty-three or twenty-four years old when he was condemned for heresy at St Andrews on the twenty-eighth of February 1528, in a court convened by James Beaton, Archbishop of St Andrews. He had been to Paris and to Marburg and had read Luther; he had returned to Scotland in 1526 and had taught the new doctrines openly. The court found him guilty in the morning. He was burnt at the stake at the gate of St Salvator's College that same afternoon. The wood was wet, the wind was off the sea, the executioner had to be sent to the priory for more powder. The fire took six hours to consume him. Knox, writing his History thirty-eight years later, gave the phrase: *the reek of Master Patrick Hamilton has infected as many as it blew upon*. The Scottish Reformation, by the careful judgment of every later historian of it, has its first and longest fuse here.
- Alexander Hamilton at Redoubt 10, YorktownOn the night of the fourteenth of October 1781, Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Hamilton, twenty-six years old, aide-de-camp to General Washington and former officer of the New York Artillery, led the bayonet assault of the American light infantry on Redoubt 10, the British outer earthwork on the south-eastern flank of the besieged works at Yorktown. The French light infantry under Lieutenant Colonel de Deux-Ponts went in simultaneously against Redoubt 9 four hundred yards to the north. The orders to the American attacking column were that the muskets were to be unloaded, the bayonet alone was to do the work, and the column was to go in silently. They reached the abatis at fifteen minutes after seven and were inside the redoubt by ten minutes past. Nine American dead, twenty-five wounded. The British defenders, Captain Campbell of the Forty-Third Foot and seventy men, surrendered in ten minutes. The fall of the two redoubts placed Cornwallis's inner works under direct allied artillery enfilade. He asked for terms three days later. The British army of the South capitulated on the nineteenth. The American Revolution was, in operational terms, won at Yorktown by the assault on Redoubts 9 and 10 on the night of the fourteenth.
- Ian Hamilton and the Stone of SconeJust before five in the morning of the twenty-fifth of December 1950, four students of the University of Glasgow, Ian Hamilton (24), Gavin Vernon (24), Kay Matheson (22) and Alan Stuart (24), removed the Stone of Destiny, the inauguration stone of the kings of Scots taken to Westminster Abbey by Edward I in 1296, from beneath the Coronation Chair in the abbey. They broke the stone into two pieces in the lifting. They drove the larger piece north in a Ford Anglia by way of Kent, the smaller in a separate car by way of Birmingham. They had it repaired by a Glasgow stonemason, James Robert Gray, of Bath Street, and laid it on the high altar of Arbroath Abbey, where the Declaration of Arbroath had been signed in 1320, on the eleventh of April 1951. The Government of the day, on the advice of the Scottish Office, did not prosecute; the Stone was returned to Westminster, and in 1996 was formally returned to Scotland and is now in the Castle at Edinburgh. Ian Hamilton, who became a leading Scottish QC, said in his old age that he had done it because Scotland needed to know the Stone was not unliftable.